Earlier that morning as Gabriella and I walked through the trails in our neighborhood, she shared with me her view of Heaven, something we hadn't discussed since Joel passed. My friends had trod softly where it came to Joel, and though we talked about him, the conversation consisted of funny stories from his life, not musings about his death.
“It's full of flowers and men like da Vinci walking around with angel wings,” she said as her tiny frame kept up with my taller one. Only hours later, as I watched da Vinci among the flowers, I started to believe she could be right. Heaven would be beautiful, right? But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't picture Joel anywhere other than in my house. Joel was a city boy. If Heaven was more of a countryscape than a cityscape, how could he not feel out of place there? Then again, Heaven surely didn't have mosquitoes, Joel's biggest problem with the outdoors. He also didn't like to get dirt under his nails, so he'd worn gardening gloves. I wondered if they had gardening gloves in Heaven. Would the deacon know the answer to that? Were my questions too basic? I wished I weren't such a spiritual simpleton.
Da Vinci, on the other hand, had the dirtiest nails I'd ever seen and as soon as I saw them, I felt the compulsion to wash them for him, slowly, meticulously, using a file to clean every nail, then finish them off with a vanilla-scented lotion. Instead I said, “Don't touch anything,” as he got into the car.
“You like?” da Vinci said, pointing to the exquisite landscaping in front of the office complex.
I said yes without so much as looking at his handiwork. “I like very much,” I told him.
As we passed by the Hallmark Stables on the way back to my house, da Vinci's eyes lit up upon seeing the horses grazing in the field. “Da Vinci rides horses,” he said longingly.
I glanced at the dozen or so animals in the pasture. I'd passed them nearly every day going home, but I'd never really noticed them before. Like Joel, I'd been raised a city girl in Dallas before moving to Austin to go to college, met Joel and, well, stayed and had babies and did the New York Times crossword puzzle every day. Was there more to a happy life than that?
I'd never ridden a horse in my life, save for pony rides at birthday parties. The expansion of Austin from a small city to sprawling suburbia meant occasionally the city and the country collided. “You ride horses? Well, we could arrange that.” As a stranger in a strange land, da Vinci was coping well, but I could sense he missed more than just his mama back home. If riding a horse would make him happy, then it was the least I could do.
Da Vinci ran his dirty fingers through his longish hair and instead of cringing at the thought of all that dirt, the idea of washing his hair flitted through my brain. Here, let me help you with that, I could say. My favorite part of getting my hair done was the scalp massage, and it was the first time I felt compelled to wash anyone's hair other than my children's. Something could be seriously wrong with me.
We passed by the string of fast food chains I'd sworn off, but da Vinci practically panted like a dog. “What you say, donut holes on way home?”
I hadn't eaten junk food in forty-eight hours. I practically jumped the curb as I screeched into Dunkin Donuts. How I'd missed thee!
Da Vinci and I made a great team. We finished off 36 Munchkins in under ten minutes, dunking them in coffee and rolling our eyes in sugared ecstasy.
“I love American food,” da Vinci said, patting his tight abs.
“It's terrible for you,” I said, popping the last chocolate-cake donut hole in my mouth, savoring the crunchy outside and doughy center. “It will make you fat.”
Da Vinci reached over and gently wiped away a large sugar crumb from my lip. “Then we jog extra mile tomorrow morning to work fat off bodies.”
Fireworks went off in my head, proof that da Vinci had an effect on me. I'd sworn the only way anyone was getting me to run was to be chasing me with a machete. But to spend more time with da Vinci and possibly lose a few pounds in the process? I'd be an idiot to turn that down.
I dropped da Vinci off at the house, reminding him about his early classes at UT the next day. I offered to drive him because I needed to visit the library for more research for my dissertation. Honest.
Da Vinci thanked me with his smile, something like a physical tip that was far better than money ever would be. “We ride together,” da Vinci said. “Da Vinci teach Mona Lisa to ride.” It dawned on me he didn't mean the car, but horses, but I was too caught up by my nickname.
Mona Lisa: the famed art of the pseudo-smiling brunette painted in the 1500s and the nickname given to one blonde widow by her sexy tenant. I had figured out the Mona Lisa within Ramona Elise in college in my first linguistics class. My parents hadn't been that clever on purpose. They had just lumped two family names together as so many expecting parents do: Ramona for my paternal grandmother and Elise for my maternal great-grandmother. It was an accident, yet Anh believed my secret moniker and da Vinci's appearance were no accident at all.
I didn't mind da Vinci giving me a nickname, forming some bond that only we shared. I never considered bonding with da Vinci on purpose. But it was an unwritten rule that no teacher could date students, so my idea of bonding did not go beyond that of one caring teacher helping out a student.
As I stepped into the beautiful marble foyer at the archdiocese where I was to meet with Deacon Friar (a man who had lived up to his moniker, another example of name revealing one's destiny), I stared at the largest reproduction of the da Vinci's Last Supper that I'd ever seen. The picture was at least twenty feet wide, so large that I could study the expressions of the disciples and the hands of Jesus, and I shuddered. The work was pure genius.
I thought of Joel and our last supper together, the night before his collapse on the basketball court, an hour after our nonverbal argument; we ate pizza, but not just any pizza: Joel's favorite, the expensive kind we could only afford once a month. It was hand-tossed by an Italian, the short, mustached man who had come to America with only a dream in his back pocket and a recipe for the crispiest yet gooiest pizza I'd ever tasted. I smiled at the memory. I hadn't thought about Joel's last supper before that moment. I'd thought about his last breakfast: Wheaties. And his last snack: peanut butter on crackers before he headed out to the park to play a pickup game with the neighbors. But his last real meal had been his favorite, something that suddenly comforted me greatly.
When Deacon Friar caught me studying the painting, I hadn't realized I had tears in my eyes, but not from the artwork. “It's quite beautiful, isn't it?”
I wiped my eyes and nodded, taking in Deacon Friar's appearance. I expected him to look more like a friar from the seventeenth century, wearing a brown robe beneath a bald head. Yet he appeared very modern, tall and attractive with salt-and-pepper hair and a face full of compassion that fit his profession. Gabriella had told me he was a widower with two grown boys, and that losing his wife had pushed him into the Church in a way that only a loss of such magnitude could. I had said half-jokingly that I should join a convent after losing Joel. Escaping from the world for nothing but 24/7 silence and solitude had seemed like a good fix at the time, but knowing how crazy the quiet around my home made me, I knew it would be even worse if I went somewhere where it was expected. Besides, I was no nun.